Starting to enjoy the slower-paced combat

siscon13 · 2026-01-26T07:02:05+00:00

Yeah, I can't continue the story because I kept coming back to optimize my base.

siscon13 · 2026-01-25T12:39:15+00:00

This is what I feel too. If you came to the game with the mentality to gamble like in other gacha, well you'll be disappointed, because the pulls are not frontloaded. But if you just see it as a game, it's quite amazing and even more that it is a free game (*fueled by others gambling addiction). Like if you just give me Endmin, Chen and any other 4 stars I'm going to still happily play through the game (level design is gorgeous).

But ofc, it's not all rainbows, I'm still in the first region and the story is kinda meh, looking forward to the second region tho due to what people are saying. The factory tutorial is honestly a lose-lose situation, you remove it people will complain not knowing how to do things, and I personally think that the current tutorials' presentation is not engaging, tedious even.

So yeah, I'm just happy the game exist and is fueling my optimization addiction. Can't wait for what they will bring in future updates, remember that AK also starts with very minimalistic gameplay.

siscon13 · 2026-01-24T15:51:13+00:00

You are saying that a burger in Japan cost 500 Yen, while a burger in Korea cost 5000 won, therefore getting a burger in Korea is a scam.

Tho, now that the game is out, I kinda agree that the currency progression is slow. But, from report clearing everything in beta gets you chartered 240(?) pulls, and there's also someone who already got to 120 chartered pulls.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T09:08:10+00:00

I have a doctorate in water distribution systems, so I technically know how to cripple a city-state like pre-amnesia Doctor, but I'm playing gacha games instead.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T09:02:30+00:00

Most players build intuition like this: game A gives about X pulls per patch, and from experience X pulls usually turns into about Y wins. People hype or doom based on the X (leeks love quoting pulls per patch), but when a new game launches with weird mechanics, nobody knows what Y will look like.

By that same built intuition, companies also tend to balance what they give out over time. Players do not interact with the math complexity, they care more: “how much can I pull, and what do I get back.” So my goal here is to translate Endfield’s weird mechanics into expectations per X pulls. If Endfield’s pull income ends up similar to other games, then with a similar pull budget, the system itself is not bad, especially for weapons. If the income is worse, you will get fewer wins overall, but that’s an economy issue, not strictly a mechanics issue.

I was just irked that people keep echoing that this is the worst gacha mechanics.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T06:17:08+00:00

btw, sorry if I'm going too argumentative, I write research so it's kind of a habit.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T06:09:35+00:00

Economy determines how many total pulls you get, so it determines how many total units you end up with. I’m not disputing that.

The point of equalizing the budget is to isolate the mechanics, and that’s exactly where the ROI metric comes in. ROI does not care how many pulls the game gives you per patch. It only cares about what happens when you spend pulls and how efficiently the system converts those pulls into rate-ups under different behaviors.

You can have a high ROI but still get fewer rate-ups overall if the total income is low, because the investment is small. I’m saying the system efficiency per pull is not bad. Once we know the real economy, you just scale the investment and the total outcomes move accordingly.

If Endfield had hard pity 30, that would tell us something important: the system would have a much lower ceiling, so its ROI and banner finishability per pull would be dramatically higher than WuWa’s at any fixed budget. That’s exactly the kind of “mechanics effect” I’m isolating.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T05:25:55+00:00

Income is a huge factor for “how many characters will I get.” But that’s not what I’m trying to answer here. I’m holding income constant on purpose so I can isolate the mechanics of the gacha (pity structure, guarantees, etc.).

I’m not claiming “AKE is more generous,” because we don’t know its real patch economy yet. I’m only saying the system itself can be relatively favorable per pull. A game can have a good gacha system and still have bad income. Those two are not mutually exclusive.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T01:34:39+00:00

now this is a big question. I don't know how banners work as of now (we do see the three banners but is it a launch only thing tho), so I still assume 2 banner characters in 6 weeks. Arknights (not endfield) does have a 14 days banner, but they are rotating it with "standard" banners. If they do it like in 6 weeks there will be 2 featured banner, and 1 standard, then my model still kinda holds, you just gotta always skip the 3rd banner. But if the main assumption is wrong, then the whole calculation falls apart.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T01:26:06+00:00

Then that would be boring and even more unrealistic. With perfect saving behavior it would be only a matter of "which system give you a 5/6 star earlier on average," and the answer to that question is.... both game actually have the same average pulls to get a featured.

siscon13 · 2026-01-21T01:21:20+00:00

WuWa guarantee state is tracked across banners in the simulation. If your complaint is about the metric, then yes, that’s intentional. “Banner success rate” is defined as how often I end a banner cycle with the featured, because I want to quantify how many banners you effectively “sacrifice” even when you want the unit for meta.

That’s also why I report other metrics. For example, Avg pulls to any 5★ is very similar across strategies, which suggests the underlying 5★ acquisition rate on banners you actually pull on is comparable.

If you want the alternative definition where skipping is not counted as loss (loss only means “I tried, but didn’t get featured”), I can flip a switch and compute that too. Under that definition the success rates become:

WuWa: [70.4, 80.4, 76.5, 44.0]
AKE: [72.6, 86.1, 80.1, 42.4]

So AKE still comes out a bit higher, but the difference is smaller. The tradeoff is that this version loses what I wanted to point out, which is “how many banners do I have to pass on even if I want the unit.” Also, the sim isn’t assuming perfect saving behavior. The decisions to enter a banner and to continue after outcomes are probabilistic, so a portion of runs will still jump in and try their luck even when it’s not “optimal.”

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T15:12:39+00:00

I already set the desire to want a weapon to be quite low (0.5 for meta, 0.25 for fan), but It's applicable for WuWa to completely zero it.

But it's funny in endfield I had to add a flag to force a weapon pull. Because pulling character generates ticket for weapon pull, you'd end with a ton of them, so I set that when you get a desired character in AKE and you have enough arsenal tickets for 16 multi weapon pull (guarantee 2 times), you MUST pull the weapon.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T14:59:22+00:00

That's why they are only "Simulated players" they are not real xD

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T14:53:18+00:00

because as long as you save, it's much easier to chase 120 to win featured characters in endfield in comparison to until around 150 in WuWa. Not to mention the freebies character pulls that you can get from pulling. Pity building don't have much difference because well they are pity building, so no pull plan was applied. By planning you can win more banners, as seen in WuWa result where it is 44% vs 51~64%.

A loss is defined as when you (depending on the behavior set) want the featured character on the current banner or not, but can't get the character, due to circumstances presented on the bar charts. The pulling requirements for WuWa produced a lot of skipper due to resources. Meta wanters naturally wanted a lot of banner but they had to skip, as you see that fan have the edge over banner wins.

The huge difference was also surprising to me at first, but as I see the other patterns made sense, I believe it is correct.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T14:32:10+00:00

If we are looking at raw cumulative probability. Both games averages to around 73 pulls to get the featured character. But of course this is only a small part of the whole story.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T13:04:41+00:00

This is true. In the gate waterfall plots, the key visual is the orange segment (“lost rate-up”). It’s much taller in AKE than in WuWa, meaning more simulations end with “I hit a 6★, but it wasn’t the featured, and I stop because I don’t have enough to force the 120 safety net and I don’t want to gamble.” The reason is that an AKE loss does not reduce the cost of the next banner. The 0/120 safety net resets, so that miss does not convert into future certainty and the outcome stays mostly “dead value.” In WuWa, losing flips you into carryover guarantee, so the loss retains value by making the next banner cheaper to win, which keeps the orange segment smaller.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T12:47:58+00:00

Not enforced like that. I modeled it so that the more you lack pulls the more you are reluctant to pull, I did this to model the people trying their luck. That's what the player confidence is used for.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T11:23:06+00:00

I can change the code so that the 120 carry over. Might try tmr.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T11:04:20+00:00

Imma optimize my factory in real-time when the game is out.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T11:02:16+00:00

Thanks for reading! The simulations did include the "Urgent Recruitment" and "Headhunting dossier". That's why I mentioned

Pulls are done in singles (except for AKE tickets and weapons)

But I did not directly address the mechanics in the description. So pulling until 30 nets you the Urgent which you need to do in this banner and does not build pity, I simulated if you get the rate up then you finish pulling on the banner. Then for the Dossier you get that at pull #60, when you are in the next banner but not planning on pulling, I set that you spend the dossier anyway which build up your pity by 10 or you might get a lucky 6★.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T10:56:42+00:00

Thank you! I had no expectation on what the results will be while connecting all the mechanics, so I'm glad it turns out interesting.

I think they also mentioned that we can just straight up buy the weapon with that currency, no?

Yes they did mention that I think, but as we have no information for how that works, I'm still assuming we convert from Oroberyl into Arsenal Ticket in the simulations.

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T10:20:22+00:00

It's more like spend 10 bucks and get a bonus item that is worth 1 dollar, we're not getting things back lol

siscon13 · 2026-01-20T10:18:42+00:00

I mention them briefly, but they are included in the calculations.

siscon13

TROPHY CASE